xp_logs | Nathan and Jim, Monday afternoon (Reply)

Nathan's TK is becoming very, very cranky behind its mental block. Jim manages to prevent anything more than minor damage to the staff room. Nathan is grateful enough that he... pokes Jim very hard on the subject of why the younger man's been avoiding him for the last several weeks.

He'd decided to sit down in the staff room and work on the list of readings for the Arabic group. Oh, he could have done it in the boathouse, but Nathan was all too aware of just how quickly he was liable to become distracted if he did that. I probably need to borrow one of the empty offices for office hours this term, he reflected, leafing through one of the readers he'd ordered off Amazon the previous week. His students weren't going to want to trek down to the boathouse to see him, he suspected.

He wasn't concentrating very well today, quiet staff room or not. He'd woken up with a nagging headache that had taken a significant dislike to noise. And light. Nathan paused in his reading to rub at his eyes, sighing. Impairing his productivity, these damned headaches were. It was frustrating.

Ooh, chapter on poetry... He was a mean old bastard to make them translate poetry, but it was good practice. Nathan focused on the first of the poems in the section, trying to gauge the difficulty level.

And his brain didn't like Arabic script much today either, it seemed. After the second zone-out, Nathan set the book down, grimacing, and rubbed at his temples. "Snap out of it," he muttered. In response, the pain between his eyes grew suddenly sharper, and he gasped, his vision going white. Around him, furniture started to rattle ominously.

The odd surge of TK was familiar enough around here, but the accompanying stab of pain he could sense was not. It felt like hot needles on his brain. Jim halted at the end of the hall, jaw clenching as he soothed his own irrational prickle of anxiety and the accompanying instinct to let Jack step in. Calm down. This place is safe. No danger. No danger.

But the telekinesis . . . wasn't stopping. And neither was the pain.

Jim hurried to the lounge, the papers he'd been heading to get from his office forgotten.

"Nate? Nate!"

By the time Jim got to the staff room door, everything that wasn't nailed down was floating, including the chair in which Nathan was sitting huddled, hands pressed to his temples, his expression twisted with pain. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and he didn't so much as twitch at Jim's arrival. The larger pieces of furniture drifted idly through the air, but smaller objects - Nathan's papers, the mugs from beside the coffeemaker, the coffemaker itself, a variety of other things - were being drawn into tighter orbits around him, falling into discernible patterns. The top of the water cooler broke with a snap of plastic, and the contents spun outwards in long strands that wound themselves through the room in spirals that anyone who'd ever practiced Askani meditation patterns would recognize instantly.

Jim's face twitched with transferred pain. Millions of hot pins in his head, like biting a live wire. Subconscious conflict, all the more uncomfortable for being familiar.

The possibility of asking was immediately dismissed. Words weren't going to get through. Psychic disturbance, psychic intervention. Jim stretched out with his telepathy and did what Charles had done for him in the very worst of his episodes. Moving as carefully as he could and paying no attention to the water swirling past his face, Jim worked his way in and trickled calm into the other man's mind, artifically soothing the tension. It was a drastic step he liked to use no more than Charles had, but Nate was clearly in pain -- and Jim was in a position to know that with a power like telekinesis inner tension could all too quickly become outer.

The furniture dropped to the floor, as did the orbiting objects - and the water. Nathan's chair wobbled for a moment as it came into contact with the carpet, and he caught his breath, his vision clearing all at once. "Shit," he muttered, seeing the mess all around him. His head was pounding, but in a less alarming way than it had been before... whatever had just happened. Gray eyes met Jim's uncertainly. "You were... I had another TK fit, didn't I? And I felt you..." Jim was standing there, and... Nathan blinked. "I still feel you," he said hesitantly, but the impression was gone in another instant and Nathan's expression crumpled in unhappy frustration.

"I . . . stepped in. Sorry." Jim hadn't even flinched when the stream of water drifting past his face had fallen across one tennis shoe with a plop. Immediate tension dealt with, Jim withdrew from Nathan's mind. It was the first time he'd used his telepathy on anyone since San Diego. It felt odd to touch another mind with his own after all this time. He took his hand off the doorframe. "Are you okay?"

Nathan wrestled his expression back under control, managed a faint smile. "Head hurts," he said, pushing himself up awkwardly out of the chair and starting to clean up the mess he'd made. "Otherwise okay, I think. Doesn't look like I did too much damage to the room, at least - I guess Cain doesn't have to toss me in the lake. Thank you?"

"Don't worry about it. Um, here . . ." Jim moved to help the other man pick up some of the mess. He knelt to scrape together some of the papers, which had all fallen in the rough shape of a curving line. Jim looked up and gave him an awkward smile. "I have deja vu."

Jim was right. He had helped him pick up a powers-trashed room before. "I think I actually did less damage this time," Nathan said wryly, looking around at the furniture. Nothing visibly broken. Only one of the mugs had shattered, even. He got up a little too quickly and tottered, briefly dizzy at the change in position. "Damn it, I'll be glad when this stops happening," he muttered, pushing the couch back against the wall where it belonged.

"Yeah. TK fits aren't fun." This was . . . awkward. Jim had made a brief stop by Rachel's birthday party a few weeks ago, but he'd hardly talked to Nathan since. He hadn't quite been avoiding him, but --okay, maybe he'd been avoiding him. Well too late, Cyndi said, rolling her eyes. Look at it this way: if it gets too bad Jack can always punch him in the head to give you time for a getaway. Jim winced. Really, really not funny.

Nathan found the Arabic reader, open upside down under a chair, and rescued it, smoothing the pages. His head was clearing enough that Jim's awkward silence was beginning to register, and despite everything, his lips twitched in a brief smile. "So," he said, "if I happened to stand in front of the door and deny you an easy exit, would you just keep standing there with that 'I don't know what to say' face on, or would you say to hell with it and move me?"

"Um." Self-defense, Jack snarled. NO. The resurgence of Jack and Cyndi was making him want to revert to the old defense-mechanisms. Things he'd thought he put behind him, and didn't need to be resorting to again. We are an adult. Several adults. For Christ's sake, just deal with it.

"Sorry," Jim said, pulling his eyes up from the papers he was piling. "I've been weird lately. I probably should have learned how to deal with the people I've attacked by now. It's not like I haven't had a lot of practice."

"I can't really speak to how much practice it takes," Nathan said, picking up the intact mugs and setting them carefully back beside the now-righted coffeemaker. "But you're not the only one who's attacked the team, you know. They're quite forgiving when there are mitigating circumstances."

"Yeah. I know. And it doesn't even rank in the top five unfortunate incidents for this group. I mean, it doesn't really compare to trying to assassinate a world-leader or anything . . ." Yeah, you just meant it. Jim placed the stack of papers back on the table, mismatched eyes lowered. "It's just . . . weird."

"Although I think you've been avoiding me for more reason than the smack upside the head on the beach," Nathan said, looking back over his shoulder at Jim, the penetrating look in his grey eyes combined incongruously with a wry smile. "Oh, look, I didn't need the telepathy. Lorna would make me cookies." If there was a slight edge of bitterness to the words, nevertheless they were true. He didn't need the telepathy. His last actual conversation with Jim had been suggestive enough.

We're insane. No jury in the world would convict us. "It's nothing," muttered the younger man, grateful Nathan didn't have his telepathy right now. The papers were very interesting. There was Arabic script on some of them. "Really, it's nothing. It's just stuff in my own head that I need to get over. I've a lot of stuff in there. It's messy."

"And if you need space, I'm fine with that - if you need the space, and if you need it." Here was one of those situations where he really wished he did have his telepathy, because it was so much easier to convey those nuances of meaning that way. "If you're avoiding me just because of what happened, don't. And if there's something more-" As he was almost positive there was. "-I wish you'd tell me what it is."

Jim stared at his hands, mindlessly smoothing out the papers on the table. Telling. What was there to tell? He hadn't done it for the recognition. That's not why it had happened at all. But someone had been there with him. Two people. Two people who'd really understood what he'd done, who he should have been able to talk to now that it was over. That, at least, would have made the consequences bearable. Now one of them was gone, and the other . . .

It was gone. The entire event erased, as if the most important thing Jim ever done was just a footnote torn from someone else's book. Inconsequential.

He had done a good thing, self-sacrificing and heroic. And now, just because Nathan couldn't remember it, he was upset. So much for selfless universal compassion.

He felt angry, and abandoned, and completely helpless. What would telling the other man serve? Nathan couldn't make himself remember. Jack had seen to that. The anger was irrational. The fact that Jack now wanted to attack him for the very same thing he'd caused . . . made no sense. But Jack hadn't made sense in a long time.

"It's nothing," Jim said at last, giving Nathan a lopsided smile. "Like I said, it's just a point of view thing. I'll get over it. It's wasn't anything you did, or need to worry about." He could feel Jack sneering at the lie even as his lips moved to form the words. Nothing. Yeah, that's how it's always been. Defective David, nothing-boy.

'It's not you, it's me?' Very funny, Dayspring. Nathan looked back down at the mugs, glad that he had his back to Jim while he got his expression back under control. "You know," he said after a moment, not turning around. He adjusted the position of the mugs meticulously. "I seem to recall you listening to me in all kinds of situations where I was being overemotional or irrational or terminally stubborn about something in the bad way." He smiled a bit, mirthlessly. "I'm not young or self-centered enough to make this a trust issue, that you clearly have a problem that involves me that you won't share. I'll even buy that it's something that I can't help you with, or I think you probably would tell me. Just..."

His hands clenched briefly with frustration, hovering over the mugs - which rattled. "This feels like something that's not going to go away," he said more briefly. "And I would miss you if you decided that you wanted to go on avoiding me for however long the two of us are both living here."

Uh, is it just me or does it sound like he thinks we're breaking up? Inappropriate, Cyndi. The tremor of telekinesis that prickled at the back of his neck wasn't enough to trigger Jack, at least.

"I'm . . . messed up," Jim said. "Just in general. It's not your problem, really." He finally removed his hands from the papers and smiled again, wryly. "Anyway, there's plenty of things that don't go away. It doesn't stop the world. I'll be fine. I just need some time. I'll work it out." Me, myself and us. Just like always.

"It's not like it would be a chore to listen, you know. Or a job. Is that the problem?" Nathan said, staring down at the mugs. They were glittering. Just a little. "The counselor won't take counseling from the people he's counseled - that's all well and good. Probably smart, too. But that doesn't mean David Haller can't accept support from his friends." Concentrating on the glitter was making his head hurt worse, again, and Nathan winced, closing his eyes and rubbing at his temples again with a sigh. "I'm getting perilously close to pushing, aren't I? Bad me. Don't worry, Jim - I'm not going to stand in front of the door. If you want to make a break for it, I promise not to chase you."

"It's okay." Jim scuffed at the back of his head, staring at the floor. Cyndi's voice was kicking at the back of his brain. Run, Jimmy. Run while you still can. Jim gave up. "I should go. I, um, I was going to get some stuff. But thanks, Nate. Really."

He should be satisfied with having planted the seed. Except he didn't know if he'd actually planted it, or Jim had dodged it and the seed was lying somewhere on the floor complaining bitterly about how it was never going to get to grow into a real plant... fuck, I need a handful of aspirin, I swear. He'd poked, but he hadn't pushed. Was that a good thing? That he was no longer pretending that he understood anything, or that he had a leg to stand on when it came to helping other people with their problems? Boundaries. Fuck all of it.

"Thanks?" he asked, far too lightly, still not looking at Jim. "You're the one who stepped in before I ripped the room apart. But you're right, you should go. I didn't mean to derail your afternoon." Jim could make his break for it, and Nathan could spend the rest of his afternoon trying to figure out precisely what the younger man was trying so hard not to blame him for.

He'd hurt Nathan's feelings. Jim could tell from the look on the other man's face. He should say something to fix it. Something. Anything.

But by now everything in his head was such a mess that he didn't trust that what would come out of his mouth wouldn't be cutting or cruel or completely senseless, so instead Jim only dropped his gaze as he passed the older man to the door. "Don't worry about it," he mumbled, and fled.